“Sweetness and Pollution: The Colorado Beet Sugar Industry and the South Platte Watershed, 1910-1960”
1918 great western pollution report produced by university of colorado biologists. document available in the great western sugar collection, colorado state university
In 1917, Great Western Sugar, the United States’ largest domestic sugar supplier, hired a team of university biologists to write a confidential report on how company operations impacted the South Platte watershed. Investigations revealed massive fish kills and extensive dead zones at sites where Great Western purged its wastes. Consequently, the company began recording data on sugar beet processing wastes. Yet statistics compiled in 1950 by the City of Denver revealed that Great Western’s twelve Colorado factories dumped wastes equivalent to a population of four million people and that the company made virtually no effort to curtail environmental impacts.
This article investigates why Great Western, despite growing scientific and institutional knowledge of water pollution, failed to address its pollution. I ask what factors made industrial pollution visible in rural areas and what circumstances compelled industry to institute changes. Sweetness and Pollution examines the roles played by agro-industry, emerging water pollution science, changing population dynamics, and an expanding regulatory state.
An Oral History of the Colorado Feedlot Industry
cattle in one of great western sugar’s feedlots, ca. 1920. note the stacks of sugar beet pulp and the factory in the background. photo courtesy of the natural resource archives, colorado state university
Between 1945 and 1970, consumption of beef per capita in the United States more than doubled. The growing commercial cattle feedlots in Northern Colorado were critical to that trend as they took advantage of advances in corn hybrids, mechanization, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and an explosion of institutional research. My research uses over a dozen interviews to explain the growth of these feedlots. Interviews – some of which are yet to be completed - include feedlot operators, university presidents, water managers, veterinarians, nutritionists, agricultural college scientists, a former member of the Colorado state board of agriculture, farm union leaders, politicians, farmers who contracted to sell their crops to feedlots, and at least one laborer who made the transition from crop cultivation to work in the feedlots and packinghouses. Interview findings will inform core arguments within the final chapter in my forthcoming book titled, Industrializing Place: Colorado and the Making of Agriculture in the Twentieth Century, and may also be re-written into a separate article.
This oral history will provide a satisfying and nuanced picture of the network of relationships which transformed a particular place into a center of industrial meat production, thereby influencing the eating patters of a nation.